Nicolai K. Knudsen

I’m a philosopher, working on phenomenology, social ontology, and practical philosophy. I'm currently an Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Aarhus University, and before that, I was a Carlsberg Junior Research Fellow at Linacre College, Oxford.

My main interest concerns how perception, agency, and responsibility are transformed in group settings. Combining phenomenological and analytical methods, I have published on social cognition, joint action, social normativity, and the moral responsibility of groups. My first book, Heidegger’s Social Ontology: The Phenomenology of Self, World, and Others was recently published by Cambridge University Press. Here I argue that Heidegger’s phenomenology is an underexplored resource for contemporary social ontology, and I show what Heidegger’s claim that Dasein is always already Mitsein entails for his distinct conceptions of human mindedness and agency as well as his existentialist conception of authenticity. In more recent work, I develop a pluralist approach to joint responsibility according to which poorly structured groups can nonetheless possess morally relevant emergent capacities that make them praise- and blameworthy.

You can reach me at knudsen@cas.au.dk